The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented to them, embrace it with excitement and enthusiasm; the “new religion” spreads like wildfire; the success of the teachers is amazing. A few years, however, show a terrible change. The natives find that all white men are not missionaries; that if one set of Englishmen deplore their licentiousness, there are others to back them in it; that Christianity requires self-restraint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion is over it commences to decline, and in some cases it expires. The story of Christianity in Hawaii, in Otaheite, and in New Zealand, has been much the same: among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of the converts into extreme licentiousness; among the Maories it was put down by the sudden rise of the Hau-Hau fanaticism. A return to a better state of things has in each case followed, but the missionaries work now in a depressed and saddened way, which contrasts sternly with the exultation that inspired them before the fresh outbreak of the demon which they believed they had exorcised. They reluctantly admit that the Polynesians are fickle as well as gross; not only licentious, but untrustworthy. There is, they will tell you, no country where it is so easy to plant or so hard to maintain Christianity. The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians--a vague polytheism, which in their poems seems now and then to approach to pantheism. The forest glades, the mountain rocks, the stormy shores, all swarm with fairy singers, and with throngs of gnomes and elves. The happy laughing islanders have a heaven, but no hell in their mythology; of “sin” they have no conception. Hau-Hauism is not a Polynesian creed, but a political and religious system based upon the earlier books of the Old Testament; even the cannibalism which was added was not of the Maori kind. The Indians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and variety; those of Virginia were cannibals only on state occasions, or in religious ceremonials; but the Maories seem originally to have been driven to man-eating by sheer want of food. Since Cook left pigs upon the islands, the excuse has been wanting, and the practice has consequently ceased. As revived by the Hau-Haus, the man-eating was of a ceremonial nature, and, like the whole of the observances of the Hau-Hau fanaticism, an inroad upon ancient Maori customs.